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Of woman’s superiority
I’ve just finished reading Nazir Diamond Ali’s article “Of men, women, and computers” and the first thing I want to say is what nonsense!
Ali claims that men and women use their computers in vastly different ways and that women are more inept when it comes to knowing the real nitty-gritty behind their PCs.
The first part of the statement I will agree with but the second is utter tripe. There are plenty of women in Pakistan who know their way around a computer. Just ask the girls who are students at NED and Szabist.
The dynamos who edit the Spider magazine are not male but female, or the very capable women who are programmers, coders, and web designers at dozens of companies all over the o country. And I can show you half a dozen men in my extended family alone who think that DOS is flossing for dogs and that if an internet connection is running slowly it means the modem just needs more petrol.
The truth is that men and women do treat their computers differently but it has nothing to do with fear of technology or aptitude for computers. I won’t beat around the bush with my theory: men treat computers the way they should be treating women, and women treat computers the way they should be treating men.
Men lavish love and affection on their computers: they tinker with them, they take the covers off the CPUs, they fiddle around with settings and configurations, always trying to tweak a better performance out of the machine. This does not mean they should be bossily trying to improve women’s hairstyles or their fitness levels, but they should be spending the same amounts of time and attention on women that they do on their computers.
The great attention to every small detail, the worry when something isn’t going as it should, the pride in the computer’s performance and achievements, what a happy place the world would be if men did the same for the women in their lives....
Men are terrified of the runnings of women; their habits, moods, biology and chemistry are nothing but mysteries to all men who aren’t in the medical profession (and a good few who are). Yet they pride themselves in knowing just about every number, reading, and statistic that’s got anything to do with their computers. From RAM to ROM, gigaherz to megabyte, men are proud of knowing just about everything that pertains to the runnings of their PCs. But what advances could be made in terms of gender relations if men just bothered to apply themselves that tiny little bit to remembering equally important numbers about women, such as their birthdays, anniversaries, and yes, in some hopeless cases, their telephone numbers.
On the other hand, women make one big mistake in their dealings with men and that is that they pay too much attention to them. They worry about their men from morning to night: what janoo is eating, how he is sleeping, what he’s doing, where’s he going, and who he’s seeing. They want to micromanage every single little detail and make sure that it matches their standards and expectations.
Ladies, I have a news flash for you: you know the complete disdain with which you treat your computer? You know you do it: you turn off the PC without letting Windows shut down, you don’t really care how big the hard disk is or how much memory it has, you use the CPU as a drinks coaster or a footrest, and you don’t like to perform a system scan for viruses and trojans because it just takes too long. Yes, this is exactly the same way your janoo needs to be treated. Stop worrying if he’s been to the dentist or why he keeps wearing the same pants year after year when you’d gladly go with him to the store any day and help him pick out a new pair.
Just like you have confidence that your PC is working fine as long as you can download songs from Kazaa and run MSN, AIM, Yahoo, and ICQ at the same time, so you should have the same confidence in your man. He will run fine whether or not you have given him the latest books on the Atkins diet and shown him how to use the hair dryer.
You know the saying “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” because you apply it all the time — to your computer. Now take that saying and apply it to your man and you’ll be much happier, believe me.
Gentlemen, treat your ladies the way you treat your computers and you’ll be so thrilled with the results that you won’t know what hit you. Ladies, treat your men the same way you treat your computers and you’ll suddenly have so much free time that you’ll actually be able to sit down and finally, finally, just like janoo has been begging you, defragment your hard drive.
BINA AISHA SHAH
I read the article “Of men, women and computers” in Sci-tech World.
The article was intended to be a humorous analysis of the way men and women use computers but it turned out to be insulting to women like me, who are able to use computers and understand perfectly what it is they are doing and why. How can you publish articles like that?
Articles which put across women as nothing but incompetent idiots, who are incapable of even typing out a simple letter, or dont have skills that need challenging. I understand that some women are like that, but so are a lot of men I know.
It is never right to categorize people the way the article did, nor can insulting anyone’s intelligence ever be justified. Even if it was intended to be funny, I’m sorry I refuse to see anything funny or amusing in an article that insults people like me, who take great pains with their computer, and make a great deal of effort to learn whats what about it, and be able to successfully apply their knowledge to their work.
I really hope this email gets printed in your magazine.
NADIA DAMIAN FITIAO
Karachi
Editor’s reply: We received two emails bitterly criticizing Nizar Diamond Ali’s article, and are reproducing both almost unedited. Nizar’s article, as most readers understood, was written in a lighter vein, and reflected the funny side of male and female home PC users. It was not about professional women making the best of information trechnology in their careers.
Dawn Sci-tech World is entirely devoted to science and technology, and we thought an occasional piece on attitude and behaviour to show the lighter side to humour our readers would do no harm.
We would request our readers not to write any more letters on this subject as we do not want to open a male-female superiority debate in the pages of Sci-tech World.
